Earth Is The Strangest Planet Read online

  “Rampart, it’s akin to the phenomenon known as looming, only in reverse,” the eminent scientist Arpad Arka-baranan explained as he attempted to throw a rock across the narrow ditch. The rock rose very high in the air, seemed to hang at its apex while it diminished to the size of a grain of sand, and then fell into the ditch not six inches of the way across. There isn’t anybody going to throw across a half-mile valley even if it looks five feet. “Look at a rising moon sometimes, Rampart. It appears very large, as though covering a great sector of the horizon, but it only covers one-half of a degree. It is hard to believe that you could set seven hundred and twenty of such large moons side by side around the horizon, or that it would take one hundred and eighty of the big things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead. It is also hard to believe that your valley is five hundred times as wide as it appears, but it has been surveyed, and it is.”

  “I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife,” Robert chanted dully. “Damn, I let her get away again.”

  “I tell you, Rampy,” Clarence Little-Saddle squared on him, “a man that lets his wife get away twice doesn’t deserve to keep her. I give you till nightfall; then you forfeit.

  I’ve taken a liking to the brood. One of us is going to be down there tonight.”

  After a while a bunch of them were off in that little tavern on the road between Cleveland and Osage. It was only half a mile away. If the valley had run in the other direction, it would have been only six feet away.

  “It is a psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome,” said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk. “It is maintained subconsciously by the concatenation of at least two minds, the stronger of them belonging to a man dead for many years. It has apparently existed for a little less than a hundred years, and in another hundred years it will be considerably weakened. We know from our checking out folk tales of Europe as well as Cambodia that these en-sorceled areas seldom survive for more than two hundred and fifty years. The person who first set such a thing in being will usually lose interest in it, and in all worldly things, within a hundred years of his own death. This is a simple thanato-psychic limitation. As a short-term device, the thing has been used several times as a military tactic.

  “This psychic nexus, as long as it maintains itself, causes group illusion, but it is really a simple thing. It doesn’t fool birds or rabbits or cattle or cameras, only humans. There is nothing meteorological about it. It is strictly psychological. I’m glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to it or it would have worried me.”

  “It is the continental fault coinciding with a noospheric fault,” said the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan. “The valley really is half a mile wide, and at the same time it really is only five feet wide. If we measured correctly, we would get these dual measurements. Of course it is meteorological. It is the animals and cameras which are fooled, as lacking a true dimension; it is only humans who see the true duality. The phenomenon should be common along the whole continental fault where the earth gains or loses half a mile that has to go somewhere. Likely it extends through the whole sweep of the Cross Timbers. Many of those trees appear twice, and many do not appear at all. A man in the proper state of mind could farm that land or raise cattle on it, but it doesn’t really exist. There is a clear parallel in the Luftspiegelungthal sector of the Black Forest of Germany which exists, or does not exist, according to the circumstances and to the attitude of the beholder. Then we have the case of Mad Mountain in Morgan County, Tennessee, which isn’t there all the time, and also the Little Lobo Mirage south of Presidio, Texas, from which twenty thousand barrels of water were pumped in one two-and-a-half-year period before the mirage reverted to mirage status. I’m glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to this or it would have worried me.”

  “I just don’t understand how he worked it,” said the eminent scientist Willy McGilly. “Cedar bark, jack-oak leaves, and the word ‘Petahauerat.’ The thing’s impossible! When I was a boy and we wanted to make a hideout, we used bark from the skunk-spruce tree, the leaves of a box-elder, and the word was ‘Boadicea.’ All three elements are wrong here. I cannot find a scientific explanation for it, and it does worry me.”

  They went back to Narrow Valley. Robert Rampart was still chanting dully: “I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife.”

  Nina Rampart came chugging up out of the narrow ditch in the camper and emerged through that little gate a few yards down the fence row.

  “Supper’s ready and we’re tired of waiting for you, Robert,” she said. “A fine homesteader you are! Afraid to come onto your own land! Come along now; I’m tired of waiting for you.”

  “I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife!” Robert Rampart still chanted. “Oh, there you are, Nina.

  You stay here this time. I want my land! I want my children! I want an answer to this terrible thing.”

  “It is time we decided who wears the pants in this family.” Nina said stoutly. She picked up her husband, slung him over her shoulder, carried him to the camper and dumped him in, slammed (as it seemed) a dozen doors at once, and drove furiously down into the Narrow Valley, which already seemed wider.

  Why, that place was getting normaler and normaler by the minute! Pretty soon it looked almost as wide as it was supposed to be. The psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome had collapsed. The continental fault that coincided with the noospheric fault had faced facts and decided to conform. The Ramparts were in effective possession of their homestead, and Narrow Valley was as normal as any place anywhere.

  “I have lost my land,” Clarence Little-Saddle moaned. “It was the land of my father Clarence Big-Saddle, and I meant it to be the land of my son Clarence Bare-Back. It looked so narrow that people did not notice how wide it was, and people did not try to enter it. Now I have lost it.” Clarence Little-Saddle and the eminent scientist Willy McGilly were standing on the edge of Narrow Valley, which now appeared its true half-mile extent. The moon was just rising, so big that it filled a third of the sky. Who would have imagined that it would take a hundred and eighty of such monstrous things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead, and yet you could sight it with sighters and figure it so.

  “I had a little bear-cat by the tail and I let go,” Clarence groaned. “I had a fine valley for free, and I have lost it. I am like that hard-luck guy in the funny-paper or Job in the Bible. Destitution is my lot.”

  Willy McGilly looked around furtively. They were alone on the edge of the half-mile-wide valley.

  “Let’s give it a booster shot,” Willy McGilly said.

  Hey, those two got with it! They started a snapping fire and began to throw the stuff onto it. Bark from the dog-elm tree—how do you know it won’t work?

  It was working! Already the other side of the valley seemed a hundred yards closer, and there were alarmed noises coming up from the people in the valley.

  Leaves from a black locust tree—and the valley narrowed even more! There was, moreover, terrified screaming of both children and big people from the depth of Narrow Valley, and the happy voice of Mary Mabel Rampart chanting “Earthquake! Earthquake!”

  “That my valley be always wide and flourish and such stuff, and green with money and grass!” Clarence Little-Saddle orated in Pawnee chant style, “but that it be narrow if intruders come, smash them like bugs!”

  People, that valley wasn’t over a hundred feet wide now, and the screaming of the people in the bottom of the valley had been joined by the hysterical coughing of the camper car starting up.

  Willy and Clarence threw everything that was left on the fire. But the word? The word? Who remembers the word?

  “Corsicanatexas!” Clarence Little-Saddle howled out with the confidence he hoped would fool the fates.

  He was answered not only by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning, but also by thunder and raindrops.

  “Chahiksi!” Clarence Little-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn’t think it would. It will be
all right now. I can use the rain.”

  The valley was again a ditch only five feet wide.

  The camper car struggled out of Narrow Valley through the little gate. It was smashed flat as a sheet of paper, and the screaming kids and people in it had only one dimension.

  “It’s closing in! It’s closing in!” Robert Rampart roared, no thicker than if he had been made out of cardboard.

  “We’re smashed like bugs,” the Rampart boys intoned. “We’re thin like paper.”

  “Mort, ruine, ecraisement!” spoke-acted Cecilia Rampart like the great tragedienne she was.

  “Help! Help!” Nina Rampart croaked, but she winked at Willy and Clarence as they rolled by. “This homesteading jag always did leave me a little flat.”

  “Don’t throw those paper dolls away. They might be the Ramparts,” Mary Mabel called.

  The camper car coughed again and bumped along on level ground. This couldn’t last forever. The car was widening out as it bumped along.

  “Did we overdo it, Clarence?” Willy McGilly asked. “What did one flat-lander say to the other?”

  “Dimension of us never got around,” Clarence said, “No, I don’t think we overdid it, Willy. That car must be eighteen inches wide already, and they all ought to be normal by the time they reach the main road. The next time I do it, I think I’ll throw wood-grain plastic on the fire to see who’s kidding who.”

  EMPIRE OF THE ANTS

  H. G. Wells

  Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) didn’t invent science fiction, but he is probably the most significant figure in its history. In an amazingly fertile ten-year period beginning about 1895 he produced eight or ten novels and dozens of short stories that exhaustively explored every theme of modern science fiction—time travel, space travel, mutation, interplanetary strife, the perils of technology, and all the rest—with such intellectual vigor and human insight that his work is still popular long after most other fiction of its day has been forgotten. Such masterpieces as The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The War of the Worlds remain the classic statements of their subjects. His inventive short stories, too, continue to hold readers now as they did in the 1890’s—as, for instance, this unsettling account of invasion by the insect world.

  * * *

  I

  When Captain Gerilleau received instructions to take his new gunboat, the Benjamin Constant, to Badama on the Batemo arm of the Guaramadema and there assist the inhabitants against a plague of ants, he suspected the authorities of mockery. His promotion had been romantic and irregular, the affections of a prominent Brazilian lady and the captain’s liquid eyes had played a part in the process, and the Diario and O Futuro had been lamentably disrespectful in their comments. He felt he was to give further occasion for disrespect.

  He was a Creole, his conceptions of etiquette and discipline were pure-blooded Portuguese, and it was only to Holroyd, the Lancashire engineer who had come over with the boat, and as an exercise in the use of English—his “th” sounds were very uncertain—that he opened his heart.

  “It is in effect,” he said, “to make me absurd! What can a man do against ants? Dey come, dey go.”

  “They say,” said Holroyd, “that these don’t go. That chap you said was a Sambo—”

  “Zamboo; —it is a sort of mixture of blood.”

  “Sambo. He said the people are going!”

  The captain smoked fretfully for a time. “Dese tings ’ave to ’appen,” he said at last. “What is it? Plagues of ants and suchlike as God wills. Dere was a plague in Trinidad—the little ants that carry leaves. All der orange-trees, der mangoes! What does it matter? Sometimes ant armies come into your houses—fighting ants; a different sort. You go and dey clean the house. Den you come back again;—the house is clean, like new! No cockroaches, no fleas, no jiggers in the floor.”

  “That Sambo chap,” said Holroyd, “says these are a different sort of ant.”

  The captain shrugged his shoulders, fumed, and gave his attention to a cigarette.

  Afterward he reopened the subject. “My dear ’Olroyd, what am I to do about dese infernal ants?”

  The captain reflected. “It is ridiculous,” he said. But in the afternoon he put on his full uniform and went ashore, and jars and boxes came back to the ship and subsequently he did. And Holroyd sat on deck in the evening coolness and smoked profoundly and marveled at Brazil. They were six days up the Amazon, some hundreds of miles from the ocean, and east and west of him there was a horizon like the sea, and to the south nothing but a sandbank island with some tufts of scrub. The water was always running like a sluice, thick with dirt, animated with crocodiles and hovering birds, and fed by some inexhaustible source of tree trunks; and the waste of it, the headlong waste of it, filled his soul. The town of Alemquer, with its meager church, its thatched sheds for houses, its discolored ruins of ampler days, seemed a little thing lost in this wilderness of Nature, a sixpense dropped on Sahara. He was a young man, this was his first sight of the tropics, he came straight from England, where Nature is hedged, ditched, and drained into the perfection of submission, and he had suddenly discovered the insignificance of man. For six days they had been steaming up from the sea by unfrequented channels, and man had been as rare as a rare butterfly. One saw one day a canoe, another day a distant station, the next no men at all. He began to perceive that man is indeed a rare animal, having but a precarious hold upon this land.

  He perceived it more clearly as the days passed, and he made his devious way to the Batemo, in the company of this remarkable commander, who ruled over one big gun, and was forbidden to waste his ammunition. Holroyd was learning Spanish industriously, but he was still in the present tense and substantive stage of speech, and the only other person who had any words of English was a Negro stoker, who had them all wrong. The second in command was a Portuguese, da Cunha, who spoke French, but it was a different sort of French from the French Holroyd had learned in Southport, and their intercourse was confined to politenesses and simple propositions about the weather. And the weather, like everything else in this amazing new world, the weather had no human aspect, and was hot by night and hot by day, and the air steam, even the wind was hot steam, smelling of vegetation in decay; and the alligators and the strange birds, the flies of many sorts and sizes, the beetles, the ants, the snakes, and the monkeys seemed to wonder what man was doing in an atmosphere that had no gladness in its sunshine and no coolness in its night. To wear clothing was intolerable, but to cast it aside was to scorch by day, and to expose an ampler area to the mosquitoes by night; to go on deck by day was to be blinded by glare and to stay below was to suffocate. And in the daytime came certain flies, extremely clever and noxious about one’s wrist and ankle. Captain Gerilleau, who was Holroyd’s sole distraction from these physical distresses, developed into a formidable bore, telling the simple story of his heart’s affections day by day, a string of anonymous women, as if he were telling beads. Sometimes he suggested sport, and they shot at alligators, and at rare intervals they came to human aggregations in the waste of trees, and stayed for a day or so, and drank and sat about, and, one night, danced with Creole girls, who found Holroyd’s poor elements of Spanish, without either past tense or future, amply sufficient for their purposes. But these were mere luminous chinks in the long gray passage of the steaming river, up which the throbbing engines beat. A certain liberal heathen deity, in the shape of a demijohn, held seductive court aft, and, it is probable, forward.

  But Gerilleau learnt things about the ants, more things and more, at this stopping-place and that, and became interested in his mission.

  “Dey are a new sort of ant,” he said. “We have got to be —what do you call it—entomology? Big. Five centimeters! Some bigger! It is ridiculous. We are like the monkeys— sent to pick insects… . But dey are eating up the country.”

  He burst out indignantly. “Suppose—suddenly, there are complications with Europe. Here am I—soon we shall be above the Rio Negro, and m
y gun, useless!”

  He nursed his knee and mused.

  “Dose people who were dere at the dancing place, dey ’ave come down. Dey ’ave lost all they got. De ants come to deir house one afternoon. Everyone run out. You know when de ants come one must—everyone runs out and dey go over the house. If you stayed dey’d eat you. See? Well, presently dey go back; dey say, ‘De ants ’ave gone.’ … De ants ’aven’t gone. Dey try to go in—de son, ’e goes in. De ants fight.”

  “Swarm over him?”

  “Bite ’im. Presently he comes out again—screaming and running. He runs past them to the river. See? He gets into de water and drowns de ants—yes.” Gerilleau paused, brought his liquid eyes close to Holroyd’s face, tapped Holroyd’s knee with his knuckle. “That night he dies, just as if he was stung by a snake.”

  “Poisoned—by the ants?”

  “Who knows?” Gerilleau shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps dey bit him badly… . When I joined dis service I joined to fight men. Dese things, dese ants, dey come and go. It is no business for men.”

  After that he talked frequently of the ants to Holroyd, and whenever they chanced to drift against any speck of humanity in that waste of water and sunshine and distant trees, Holroyd’s improving knowledge of the language enabled him to recognize the ascendant word Saiiba, more and more completely dominating the whole.

  He perceived the ants were becoming interesting, and the nearer he drew to them the more interesting they became. Gerilleau abandoned his old themes almost suddenly, and the Portuguese lieutenant became a conversational figure; he knew something about the leaf-cutting ant, and expanded his knowledge. Gerilleau sometimes rendered what he had to tell to Holroyd. He told of the little workers that swarm and fight, and the big workers that command and rule, and how these latter always crawled to the neck and how their bites drew blood. He told how they cut leaves and made fungus beds, and how their nests in Caracas are sometimes a hundred yards across. Two days the three men spent disputing whether ants have eyes. The discussion grew dangerously heated on the second afternoon, and Holroyd saved the situation by going ashore in a boat to catch ants and see. He captured various specimens and returned, and some had eyes and some hadn’t. Also, they argued, do ants bite or sting?”